I’ve been reminded about a rumor that there would be a bonus when the Station V3 Facebook page got to 100 likes – Which it did a while ago, so the bonus is up today! You can see it on the Facebook page and/or when you vote for Station V3 at TopWebcomics.

In other news about the bonus, I used the Bamboo tablet to draw this one (and the last one, which is still up over at Z7). One of the things I like about it is the ability to immediately undo my mistakes – one of the things I DON’T like is that so far they’re mistakes I wouldn’t be making with pen and paper! So for now the plan is still to draw Station V3 on paper, and use the tablet for the spinoffs and bonus comics.

I’ve got a number of things on the Station V3 “I should really get around to…” list, like getting the second book finished (still “almost there!”), redesigning the web site, drawing more guest strips, etc. Things I’ll get to when I’ve got the time, but of course drawing the comic comes first!

Anyway, I finally got around to a minor(?) item on the list, which I think came from a PodWarp 1999 discussion a couple years ago – trying to draw with a tablet instead of pen and paper. I recently got a Wacom Bamboo pen tablet, and I’ve been trying it out with some different drawing programs. It’ll take a little getting used to, and I’m certainly not ready to start drawing the strip with it yet, but it’s been fun to give it a try.

And since “I should really get around to” putting up another new voting bonus… Vote now and see one of the test drawings, in which the Triangulum alien who stayed behind tries talking to Ebb and a rumormonger after his translation scan fails.

On PodWarp 1999, we recently discussed drawing starfields (and we will again soon). My way of doing it is pretty basic – I leave the area blank when I draw, then when the strip is scanned, cleaned up (if necessary) and colored, I blur the image, then bucket fill the area the starfield needs to go with black. (The blur leaves an outline around anything I’ve drawn, so the lines don’t just become part of the starfield.) Then I put in some white dots, sharpen the image up again (so it doesn’t look blurry, but the outline will still be there), and reduce it to the final size for uploading. Probably not the best way of doing it, but I’m used to it, and I get the results I want!

Since the podcast, we’ve had a couple people point us to this tutorial on making a starfield with Photoshop, and I’ve given it a try. (I’m using The GIMP, but the same steps work there.) It’s probably not something I’d use in the actual strip, but the results do look nice!

Today’s first bonus, which I’m sure will come as no surprise, is a starfield picture (with the out-of-gas alien in it, too) – and the second, which has nothing to do with starfields, but does have something to do with the title of this blog post, is a bad translation of today’s strip.